Western Europe was not isolated from the rest of the world before 1500.  Nevertheless, it was peripheral in an Old World where the Indian Ocean and the Silk Road were the center.  In any type of competition for imperial power or commercial advantage, Europeans were not in a position to make big gains.  The remarkable fact about the 15th and 16th centuries is that Europeans, in a short period of time, recentered the world, putting themselves in a position to make the really big profits.

This was anything but an inevitable development.   I think that Europe was lucky.  China was in some ways economically and militarily superior, and it is possible that China could have pre-empted European expansion.    The civilization of Europe also looked less than formidable when compared to its closest competitor, the empire of the Ottoman Turks.
Throughout the 15th century Christians stood in awe of the vast, unified Islamic empire that was reversing all the gains of the Crusades and then
some.

Ironically, the Turks played a big role in stimulating the new explorations and conquests, because they endangered the near-monopoly of Mediterranean trade, especially the spice trade, that Venice had long enjoyed.  A speculative but essentially practical interest in new trade routes and more convenient access to the Asian market, played an important role in the
developments to come.

Another element in the unexpected European expansion was the Crusading spirit, which was not dead yet.  There was one place where the old battle against the traditional Muslim enemy was going quite well, and that was the Iberian peninsula. Two Iberian  kingdoms with strong Crusading traditions, Portugal and Castile, took the lead in western and overseas exploration.

The Portugese made the first moves on their own.  The leading spirit was Prince Henry the Navigator, a younger son of the royal family, who pioneered the European exploitation of West Africa.  West Africa had long been famous as a source of gold, and the desire to outflank Morrocan middlemen was an important motive in Prince Henry's expeditions.

The expeditions of Henry and his successors did make profits.  On top of improved access to the gold fields, the Portugese founded a flourishing colonial agriculture in Madeira and the Canary Islands.  Slave cultivation of sugar, which was a high-profit cash crop, was pursued on these islands long before it was introduced into the Caribbean -- though in fact the Venetians had long been running sugar plantations in the eastern Mediterranean.  One new element was that the slaves in Madeira were not
eastern Europeans or people from Russia or the Caucasus region of West Asia, but black Africans.

 It was in this period that Europeans combined square and triangular sails to produce ships that could sail closer to the wind.  Experimentation on the trips to the Canaries and back taught the Portuguese how to use the ocean currents to get back home against the prevailing winds, no trivial problem.

It was advances such as these that allowed Vasco da Gama to round Africa and sail to India in 1497, thus bringing European sailors directly into the heart of commerce of the Old World.  During the first two decades of the 16th century, the Portuguese siezed control of the Indian Ocean spice trade.  Under Francisco de Almeida and Afonso de Albuquerque, Portugal conquered a series of strategic bases that allowed them to monopolize the flow of Indonesian spices to Egypt and Europe.

Portugal was unable to maintain that absolute monopoly.  But Portugal had become a world power, which it was to remain for over century.  Besides a major share of the spice trade to Europe, Portugal was able to skim the profits of the huge regional trade within the Indian Ocean.

If Portugal did well out of overseas expansion, its next-door neighbor, the Spanish kingdom of Castile, did even better.  As in the Portugese case, Castilian expansion owed a lot to Crusading enthusiasm.  In the late 15th century, Castile, the most belligerent of the Iberian kingdoms, was ruled by the famous Queen Isabella.  With her husband and partner, Ferdinand of Aragon, she owned most of peninsula.  Ferdinand and Isabella were ambitious people, and in the course of their reign they
accomplished what Christian monarchs had dreamed of for centuries -- the expulsion of the Muslim rulers who had first come to Spain in A.D. 711.  Granada, a small but lush kingdom in the south of Spain, the last Muslim stronghold, fell to their armies.  It was a fateful year, 1492.  Exhilirated with their victory, with the prospect of a truly Christian Spain, the Most Catholic Monarchs, as they called themselves, implemented an even greater project -- they forced all Jews to either leave their lands
or convert.  Since the Jews were a very large minority, this was a major revolution, one with many effects in later years.

To top off their year, the queen and king decided to finance a crack-brained enthusiast who had for years been trying to raise money to find a westward route to the East.  The best geographers said such a thing was impossible, because the western ocean was too wide for a ship to cross.  But in that year of miracles, anything seemed possible.  If the plan worked, the profits be enormous and the Muslim world would be outflanked -- prospects that the Portuguese made a reality very soon thereafter.  So Christopher Columbus got his money.

Of course the best geographical brains were right.    But there was an unsuspected New World ready for exploitation, and Castile (which maintained its separate identity within Spain for a long time) acquired a monopoly on its exploitation.  Not that the NW was empty -- it supported two rather large empires, and millions of other people.  But against all reasonable expectation, Castilian noblemen and their foreign mercenaries were able to take everything worth having in a very short time.  By 1533, only forty years after Columbus sailed, Castile had conquered the Aztecs and the Incas and assembled an empire larger than Western Europe.

The more you know about the details of the conquest the more astonishing they are.   Besides the usual accidents of historical process, was a great, unexpected factor:  the introduction of European diseases, which devastated American populations, gave the Spaniards an empire that was remarkably easy to take and hold.  Indeed, they were able to remold South and Central American society into an imperial system that was remarkably profitable.  The key to these profits was silver.  Peru,
Bolivia, and Mexico had motherlodes that European technology could exploit.  For centuries, armadas left America every year, bringing large amounts of silver to Seville, and later, Cadiz.  Between 1503 and 1660, over seven million pounds of silver was extracted, and the Castilian crown received 40% of it.

Such wealth could not help but have a major effect on Spain and the rest of Europe.

First was the way it bankrolled Spanish expansionism in Europe.

Second, the silver brought on a great intensification of economic activity in Europe.   Inflation and commercial expansion were already underway, partly because of a upswing in population.  The new money added fuel to this fire.  The boom of the 16th century was very dramatic at the time and a favorite subject of economists since.

Third, American silver European mercants to maintain their foothold in the Indian Ocean and open trade with China.  Europe itself had nothing interesting enough to sell in Asia, but silver opened a lot of doors.
 
Who gained from all this activity?  Much of the money ended up in places outside of Portugal and Spain.   Neither Portugal nor Castile were commercially developed countries in 1500, and neither could manage the new wealth without help.   For banking
services, for supplies, for mining technology, outsiders, Italians, Netherlanders, and South Germans had to be brought in.  The three cities that gained most from overseas expansion were Genoa (Columbus's home town and the source of loans for his voyage), Augsburg in Germany, home of the Fugger banking family, and Antwerp, in modern Belgium.  Only Antwerp, which
became the market of Europe, was held by an Iberian monarch, the Spanish king.  It was in such places that American treasure and oriental luxuries were exchanged for European goods.  So a great deal of profit slipped through Iberian fingers and gravitated to the more urbanized decentralized parts of Europe.  The Netherlands, including both modern Belgium and Holland, profited most.

 In fact the profits of overseas expansion enabled the Netherlands to develop the third great western European empire of the time.  During the 15th and 16th centuries, Poland and the Ukraine were turned into breadbaskets for the more crowded and industrialized lands of NW Europe.  The process began when the powerful landlords of the area forced peasants into serfs, just as serfdom was disappearing in the west, and used their power to extract grain from their dependents.  This grain found a ready
market at the Baltic ports, where Flemish and German merchants bought it to take to Antwerp and Amsterdam.  The availability of NW silver at Antwerp gave the western merchants the financial leverage to control this grain market.  They transformed Northeastern Europe into a classic underdeveloped area, whose peasants provided the cheap food that supported the development of the west.  The opening up of Eastern Europe to this kind of exploitation was just as important as the opening of Asia and America, and quite comparable.
 
 In 1500, Western Europe had been one of the more populous and technologically developed parts of the world,
but it was in no position to impose its will in other regions.  Over the next century, a few strategic moves, helped along by luck, enabled Western Europe to capitalize on its resources to become the center of the world. Western Europeans dominated the seas. They had conquered an entire hemisphere hitherto unsuspected.  Their markets handled produce from the entire globe; their treasuries were filled with the silver of three continents.  At a stroke, historically speaking, Western Europe had gained great advantages over the rest of the world, an advantage it would retain and build upon for the rest of our period.
 

BIBILIOGRAPHY:

Coe, Snow, and Benson,  Atlas of Ancient America.

Alfred W. Crosby,  Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of  Europe, 900-1900. 

William H. McNeill,  The Pursuit of Power.

Geoffrey Parker,  The Military Revolution.

Eric Wolf,  Europe and the People Without History.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.